Introduction

Abstract

That pitiless word was poshlost’ (noɯлocmƅ), which the émigré novelist described, with typical relish, as a kind of kitschy pretentiousness, bad taste, banality and getting above one’s station. Nabokov’s point was that the absence in other languages of a single word describing a particular notion makes that notion less easy to comprehend or to translate conceptually. The lack of a non-Russian word that corresponds with poshlost’ would, therefore, not only bind the concept exclusively to the Russian language but to Russian culture, history and emotion also. His broader proposition — that if a word has no linguistic equivalence in another language (that is, if it cannot be translated in a single expression), the concept it describes will not be wholly comprehensible in the culture of that other language — is at the heart of this study.

The Russian language is able to express by means of one pitiless word the idea of a certain widespread defect for which the other three European languages I happen to know possess no special term. The absence of a particular expression in the vocabulary of a nation does not necessarily coincide with the absence of the corresponding notion but it certainly impairs the fullness and readiness of the latter’s perception.¹

— Vladimir Nabokov